I recently have been build a Mortgage Calculator for Mortgage Corp Mortgage Home Loan Calculator. Loans are provided to users in real-time based on the information they provide. As the user provides more details the more refined the loans become. It is pretty cool and make use of some funky jQuery functions and AJAX. If you have a chance check it out.
Dale
Unless you have been living under a rock you would of heard about Twittter which is a wonderful tool for marketing. Twitter describe themselves as micro blogging. The concept is that you constantly update it with 140 character message with what you are currently up to. This can be done several ways. More then just you going there occasionally and updating your status like you do on FaceBook, it allows for a lot more. It’s flexability and abilty to integrate with thrid party apps make it a bit of a marketer’s dream. A another good article, by Sarah Milstein, describes How Twitter Can Help at Work.
Twitter is a great tool for conecting to people who are just interested in what you are up to. Yes this is very late Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. You can connect to family, friends, strangers, colleagues, clients, bosses etc. Though you might want to keep in mind that people might not quite be interested in the fact you are taking the garbage out. They however may be more interested in developments or something new you can share with them like a cool link to a website. Why not make this easy for your readers?
Quick Tip
You can let readers add your website to their twitter by have a link to http://twitter.com/home/?status=<<type your website address here and message>> i.e.
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=I am reading about Twitter on http://www.whyitwas.com”>Add to Twitter</a>
Micro-blogging is basically providing little short updates on your world. The main two is Twitter.com and FaceBook’s status updates. Twitter allows for users to create their updates via their website, SMS, and third party apps, which you can integrate into your website.
It’s API allows for website (and desktop) designers to include tools into their website that take advantage of Twitter. These tools can either receive or post updates from/to Twitter. A couple of webmasters have used the ability to receive updates to analyses trends of links people a Twetting about. They then post the links to their websites and the names of the users posting them. http://twitturls.com/ and http://www.microblogbuzz.com/ are both sites which do this. People interested in these sort of sites then visit the site which are Tweetted.
You shouldn’t just limit yourself to the above, there is FaceBook, MySpace, Fark and many more you can setup to send links and updates to.
Wii fit is a very hot product at the moment. As of June 2008 it has sold world-wide 5.27 million copies. The Wii Fit is a lot of fun, especially playing in groups, with the exception of having to exit right out to swap players. People move around their lounge-rooms looking like fools and everyone has a great laugh. The Olivia Newton John Wii Ad is a far cry from the actual experience of Wii Fit. What you see in the ad is two aging women mildly being entertained by the Wii Fit.
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The ad follows on from Olivia’s frist Nintendo Ad for the DS Brain Training, which is little to be inspired by. The basic outline is Olivia playing the game and ignoring her assistant.
So what could Nintendo of done different? Some people have come with some innovative ideas.
Tinsley Advertising decided to make a viral ad. The ad is using a long proven formula that sex sells. Of course the claim is that the boyfriend made the video without his girlfriend’s knowledge. Who cares!? The couple are getting their lot of fame and enjoying and getting blogger and vloggers attention.
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Matt Downham & Matt Spill took a different spin with his viral ad. Going for comedy.
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But it seems not everyone is a fan of the Wii Fit. Sarcastic Gamer, who has made plenty of parodies has ripped off the original USA Wii Fit ad. Using wit and a fair bit of rational SG has managed to produce quite a funny video.
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Will it blend?, is a totally interesting concept. BlendTec, a real blender manufacture takes popular products and blends them to show the strenght of their blender. The infomercials are sort of like the knifes that can cut through a frozen tin of soup. By blending popular products like the Wii Remotes people come and watch the infomercials.
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The guys from G4 have made a great viral ad for Wii, which is still playing on the sex sells concept.
Finally one from SG again on how to kill your brand.
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We all know viral marketing is hot, if you can get it to work. When a great viral ad comes along it’s spreads across the internet like wild fire. Technologies like YouTube, blogs, wikis, and forums have been great avenues for viral marketing, in some cases it is the advocates of your products which are producing these ads. That is something money cannot buy. True advocacy is the Again & Again Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu. Dennis also maintains a website featuring other viral videos he ads produced (http://www.dennisaliu.com/)
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Dennis is promoting Apple, The Birds and The Bees, and Adobe all in the one video. He provides links for people to find out a lot more about the products.
The Gruen Transfer (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/) (which is like crack for anybody in marketing or adversing) in one of their first season episodes displayed the Cadbury Gorilla Ad. The ad is by Fallcon London and had 500,000 hits on YouTube in it’s first week. Though the ad was commissioned by Cadbury they have enjoyed the success of advocates creating their own versions on the ad, either using the orginal ad and remixing it to other songs or recreating the ad with stuff toys.
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A few years back the boys from the Chasers (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/) did a viral ad with Sunrise (http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/sunrise/) which one of the boys tried to ask his wife for a divorce. The ad did the rounds and a lot of people thought it was real even after the boys annoucned on Triple J (www.abc.net.au/triplej) that it was a fake.
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